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Adam Johnson Quotes

Adam Johnson Quotes

Enjoy the top 116 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Adam Johnson.

“Inside, Im assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartments hardwired loudspeaker. Theres one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang”
— Adam Johnson —

“Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

— Adam Johnson

“Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.”

— Adam Johnson

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

— Adam Johnson

“In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range”

— Adam Johnson

“Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything”

— Adam Johnson

“She's read every word I've written," he said. "That's the truest way to know someone's heart.”

— Adam Johnson

“I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

— Adam Johnson

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

— Adam Johnson

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

— Adam Johnson

“The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries ... Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white.”

— Adam Johnson

“You can't leave me. I'm your captive," she said. "What good's a captive without her captor?”

— Adam Johnson

Nobody every taught you loyalty ...

— Adam Johnson

“Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack-if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.”

— Adam Johnson

“In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.”

— Adam Johnson

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

— Adam Johnson

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different.

— Adam Johnson

“I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.”

— Adam Johnson

“The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.”

— Adam Johnson

“Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.”

— Adam Johnson

“His mind and his flesh had separated, his brain had sat high and frightened above the mule of his body, a beast of burden that hopefully would make it alone over the treacherous mountain pass of Prison 33. But now as a woman ran a warm washcloth along the arch of his foot, the sensation was allowed to rise up, up into his brain , and it was okay to perceive again, to recognize forgotten parts of his body as they hailed him. His lungs were more than air bellows. His heart, he believed now, could do more than move blood.”

— Adam Johnson

“Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on”

— Adam Johnson

“If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.”

— Adam Johnson

Inside, I'm assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment's hardwired loudspeaker. There's one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang

— Adam Johnson

“Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?”

— Adam Johnson

“Are there labor camps here?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"Mandatory marriages, forced-criticism sessions, loudspeaker?"
She shook her head.
"Then I'm not sure I could ever feel free here," he said.”

— Adam Johnson

“With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms-the war novel-and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration-everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant-and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less.”

— Adam Johnson

Stories are factual ... If a man and his story are in conflict it is the man who must change ... In America it is the man who matters not the story.

— Adam Johnson

“What happened?" Buc asked him. "I told her the truth about something," Ga answered. "You've got to stop doing that," Buc said. "It's bad for people's health.”

— Adam Johnson

“Graffiti, citizens, is the name for the way capitalists deface their public buildings.”

— Adam Johnson

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary?

— Adam Johnson

Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward.

— Adam Johnson

Trauma narratives are hallmarked by fragmentation, broken chronology, changing perspectives, shifts in tone, and absented moments. I

— Adam Johnson

He had been the person who took. He'd been the one who was taken. And he'd been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.

— Adam Johnson

“I do not need to recall the past," I say. "I am certain of what it was.”

— Adam Johnson

In this way, you'll live forever.

— Adam Johnson

I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you'll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that's ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you're worth. The

— Adam Johnson

“The Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.”

— Adam Johnson

“And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn't walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever? And then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he'd never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.”

— Adam Johnson

The things that make us human: freedom, art, choice, identity, expression, love. And

— Adam Johnson

Be the only one left. I'll bet I'm the

— Adam Johnson

“At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding.”

— Adam Johnson

“Since I sleep fully clothed, I'm able to answer right away. By sleeping with your clothes on, you don't need to climb under the sheets. You don't need to disturb a perfectly made bed or even fold the bed back into the couch.”